


THE POST-HUMANIST PROMETHEUS

by elektra



Series: balance of power [1]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Arrancar Mythology, Blood and Gore, F/M, M/M, Mystery, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:29:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21539797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elektra/pseuds/elektra
Summary: Szayel seeks answers on how to create arrancar, despite the great personal risks he must undertake in order to grasp godhood and cure a mysterious illness that befalls Las Noches.
Relationships: Szayel Aporro Granz/Nelliel Tu Oderschvank, Szayel Aporro Granz/Ulquiorra Cifer
Series: balance of power [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/577738
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	1. haunted

Las Noches is decently uncivilized, as far as cities go.

Half of it sits in dilapidation; however many years of skull-brained hollow throwing themselves and each other at simple, stout stone buildings that their more advanced brethren created. It makes for a lonely scene of creatures at their peak evolutionary stages sitting on wreckage in a dark, wind-blistered desert with the moon as the only witness to their bloody traversals. Columns and dried aqueducts poke out of the sides of dunes, speaking of a city that perhaps predates even the old fogy Barragan. Giant skeletons that have been accidentally unearthed may be a testament to the age of this dimension.

The other half is functional, which is a shining compliment. Closed roof buildings and towers, all clustered around the open air centrepiece of Aizen’s pilfered throne, but still spaced kilometres apart. There’s a clunky wind-power generator that chugs and chugs to spurt out electricity to select towers, but otherwise one should carry a gas lamp if they wish to truly see anything worthwhile. It’s a foul-smelling, smoggy non-solution.

It would work, if the arrancar weren’t meant to do anything else besides play out a hollow’s sad, simplistic life of ‘eat sand, die, have your remains cannibalized.’ Or, in some cases, cannibalization before death. But Szayel has a purpose, and he would be damned if he had to be happy with _making do._

With the toe of his boot, Szayel digs around in a thin layer of sand at the edge of a precipitous ravine, uncovering a similarly beige coloured trapdoor. He flips the latch and pushes the door up with the same foot before he ducks down into it. The lamp creaks on its hinges, smears soot marks onto his cloak when he holds it near to close the hatch above himself. Immediately in front of the landing space begins a descending staircase. The first few steps are dark and cramped enough to not matter if he has a lamp.

Here, he holds his breath instinctively. Whatever noxious chemicals are being emitted from the lamp aren’t going to do anything particularly profound to this body. He’d say it’s a pity, but he’d likewise not want to be subjected to the mortification of his corpse being found in some underground pit, offed by a bit of carbon fucking monoxide. Who knows who he’d slime out of and have to explain to what happened.

Szayel gulps a breath once around the corner. The stairs continue down one side of the ravine, shafts of moonlight peeking out from crags and quartz overgrowth. Usually, he looks down, out of morbid curiosity. He’s never seen the bottom.

Naturally, there’s no railing.

The way is clear, anyhow. There’s this strange otherworldly sense he’s gained here; knowing where things are without touching or seeing, knowing what the thing is if he concentrates hard enough. Szayel’s expertise with it is somewhat lacking — the Tercera had lifted his head earlier that day and, like a bear picking up on a scented wind, located an adjuchas some fifty kilometres away. This is all well and good. Szayel harbours no jealousy for the talents of beasts.

He puts the weight of his shoulder into pushing the industrial door at the end of the stairs open.

“Oi,” a voice grumbles as soon as he crosses the threshold.

Szayel puts a hand to his chest with a flourish. “Startling me is not a good way to make friends, or stay alive.”

Yammy lumbers up to him, the skittering little claws of his boneheaded companion follows suit. “Gave you goosebumps, did I?”

“Wipe that grin off,” Szayel sidesteps him, hanging his gas lamp on a hook above a dented metal table. “I could smell the layer of grime on your teeth before I even opened the door.”

Speaking of boneheaded companions — Cifer is leaning on the other end of the table. Catching the wisp of his hunched figure in the swaying lamp light is more of a fright than anything else.

“Ya sure been asking for a lot of stuff,” Yammy drawls.

“With little to show for it,” Cifer adds.

Szayel unfastens his overcoat, shakes the sand out of it, and hangs it over his arm. “Capital costs can be expected to be very high at the inception of a project. Eventually, more efficient modes of industry will be found, mitigating the costs from the outset incurred by a rigorous planning process.”

Cifer extends an open palm.

Szayel has the urge to spit and shake on it. Instead, he floats a few sheets of paper into Cifer’s hand. “In layman’s terms — I need things. As long as Aizen is willing to provide, I am willing to request. The more you ask, the less I tell you.”

“Even paraphrasing you talk too much,” he says.

“You’re in a good mood.”

That shuts him up, and gets him off the table. Szayel braces himself on the handlebar of a cart as Yammy follows suit, rattling the whole floor until the door seals behind him. It’s a miracle he can even make it back up the ravine, big and clumsy as he is.

That was enough of a diversion.

Szayel dons a fresh pair of gloves and arranges a handful of sample vials from his pockets onto the cart. He begins synthesizing the organic plasma for some time until his eyes begin to ache from smog, cavernous conditions, and the bright stage of his microscope. Nothing noteworthy emerges from his toils. It seems more and more like an exercise in futility, as though he’s doing things just for the sake of doing; handwriting instead of typewriting so the process takes up more time and seems more fruitful.

Stretching his back, Szayel slips into his coat again and grips the greasy handle of the lamp. He’ll pretend to be more useful looking for water samples at the quarry.

Approaching the surface of the ravine, he slams his elbow into a cog and crank installed several feet from the top of the stairs. The trap door opens with a deluge of sand floating down the steps and being swept by the draft into the ravine. Yammy had once tried to go straight for the door and gotten a mouthful of sand. Szayel isn’t sure how he managed to avoid falling to his death in a fit of delirious laughter.

There are few things in Hueco Mundo that inspire enjoyment. Szayel is rarely challenged and often directionless. His latest project is a worthless foray into the classification of hollow species, of which there is none. He dislikes being a recent and rare step in evolution for the species. It’s subjective, and none of the other Vasto Lorde are particularly receptive to donating themselves to science.

There’s something vestigial about how their eyes glaze over in the presence of both violence and Aizen.

Szayel doesn’t have to wonder long what his overlord may be up to at this very moment when the desert begins to scream.

Or, he has no better way of describing what the sound is. Behind him echoes the shrieking of limestone on limestone, a flurry of bits of quartz bramble that meander through cracks in the rock, and the scorching of sand from the heat of slipping uppercrust. When the clamour sizzles away, Szayel glances over his shoulder, and a pristine tower has been erected a stone’s throw from his laboratory entrance.

He unlovingly coined the term “architecture-industrial complex.” He doubts it’ll catch on. It could use some linguistic help, but all he’s surrounded by are mutes, droolers, and cannibals with fistfuls of meat slurry in their gobs. They are not mutually exclusive classifications.

A similar method of conjuring seems to be at the root of his requisitions — he asks, and it appears without other trace. Some supplies Szayel dare not wonder where Aizen could have procured it from, simply because he knows how he would have.

The desert is buzzing today; not two steps further does a blazing siren echo off mopey dunes, signalling a call for Espada to gather at the main pavilion. At least it’s something slightly less monotonous to do. Szayel does always get a cheap thrill out of disgusted glances at him across the table. He picks up his haste, meandering across the vast spaces between buildings new and crumbled alike.

The main pavilion is a ramshackle thing. Once it all may have been open air, but newer walls filled in the spaces between beams and created a large meeting room, leaving only a crumbling exterior hallway. There’s an underground tunnel pathway leading to closer buildings, but the air down there is sticky with chill.

Upon arriving, Szayel flicks off his lamp and sets it on a waist-high broken column. It leeches out a ring of greasy residue. A small crowd of fracción left to heel outside by their masters are the only adornments in the hall. They hardly recognize or acknowledge Szayel.

Inside, all the Espada are already approaching their seats. Cifer sits to Aizen’s right, looking as if lichen should be sprouting from his ears, Yammy beside. Dordoni smooths his moustache down while Nnoitra tries to squeeze his legs underneath the table and between seats.

Grimmjow makes a predatory circle around the Tercera to the end of the table, skipping several empty seats. He’s still learning how to count his single digits, and how they should relate to seating arrangements. But, given convention is smashed altogether today, Szayel slides in between Barragan and an empty seat.

Aaronniero bubbles about somewhere to his left. Szayel prefers to not look and conjecture at whatever devises such a sound.

The meeting begins when Aizen stops slurping his tea. Even threatened by being dangled over his laboratory’s ravine Szayel couldn’t say what it was about; tracing nonsense patterns into his chair’s armrest with his gloved fingertips is more stimulating. To Aizen? He’s not listening. But he has his ear to the ground on everyone else. Grimmjow is having a spat with Dordoni, it seems. Cifer is catching onto the same tension, but they’re not getting prickly over it. Neither Lilynette nor Starrk are here, but that’s been the usual for some time now, as Starrk has been difficult to coax from his wilderness sanctuary. Waiting for an epiphany. Szayel’s having one right now: he wants to bash his skull in and see what death in death has to offer.

When Aizen stands, Szayel is pleased to leave. Until he claps his hands together and gestures to two servants on the other side of the hall, who creak apart two stone doors.

“Now I have something to show you all,” Aizen’s glittery smile. Why does it look like a predator’s snarl? “A very interesting demonstration, I think. Please enter and see.”

And all the Espada bend over, smack their asses, and say, _you’re a most masterful judge of interesting things, Lord Aizen, thank you for this kindness._

Szayel’s done worse grovelling.

Everyone filters into the adjacent room quietly. It is replete with varying heights of broken columns surrounding a smooth patch of tile illuminated by a hole in the ceiling. Szayel chooses to perch on top of a column next to Cifer. Aizen is joined by Gin on the highest.

The servants wheel in a covered trolley, leaving it under the moonlight. They pull off the white cloth draped over it, revealing a squirming form wrapped in bandages. It wriggles and distorts from an indiscernible shape into something more familiar, shrinking and moulting the bandages as it goes. Peeks of scales and rough flesh turns into an even, supple brown. The shapes of horns and spurs soften into swaths of hair and joints. When all the rippling is done, a bare human form lays in the fetal position on the trolley. The servants cover it with the cloth up to the shoulders.

A mask with flat, rounded horns protrudes from the back of the head.

“Please offer a warm welcome to our newest member,” Aizen says, arms outstretched, “Azucena Torroja, Séptima.”

No one else seems to care. Szayel feels like he can’t breathe. They all leave quickly, likely devising the fastest way to kill or toy with the newest arrancar.

But Szayel stops beside Cifer at the doors to the meeting hall. “You told me not two days ago no one found more arrancar.”

Cifer looks up at Szayel through his droopy, thick eyelashes. “No one did.”

“Why was I not informed?”

“There was nothing to inform you of.”

Szayel smoothes the troubled crease in his forehead and doesn’t linger any longer.

One of the fracción, Kuusik, pulls Szayel out of line when he’s exiting the Espada’s meeting room, practically mangles his arm in trying to duck behind a fallen column framing the double doors.

“My, Roland,” Szayel remarks breezily, even though the cogs in his head were churning too rapidly to notice Kuusik earlier. “You must have no bedside manner at all, if this is how obvious you are in asking me to suck you off. You could have _asked._ In a _whispering_ manner.”

“What?” Kuusik scowls. “Oh. Uh. No. No, no, no. That’s not what I wanted.”

Szayel rolls his eyes. “Clearly. You’ve not even unbuckled your trousers yet, if it was. Speak quickly or I’ll not be so kind in forgetting your rude interruption.”

Kuusik drops his head submissively. Remorsefully. Which is something new. “Forgive me, Szayelaporro, it’s just that it’s important. Maybe urgent.”

“Don’t leave me in suspense, now.”

“You’re a doctor, right? You, uh, know? Things?”

“That’s a very broad description of my talents, but I am inclined to respond affirmatively.”

“Can you, uh —“ Kuusik yanks the zipper of his uniform down —

“Oh,” Szayel drawls, “I thought you didn’t —“ But then Kuusik pulls all the spare fabric away from the right side of his ribs, and reveals a patch of dark mauve, splotchy skin. “ _Oh._ ”

“Yeah,” Kuusik wheezes. “I don’t think that’s supposed to happen, right? It’s been like that for almost a week.”

“I plead silence. I’ve never _seen_ contusions on arrancar before,” Szayel gestures vaguely at the affliction, “but to say it may never happen is… still a dubious claim given my lack of reliable data…”

Szayel glides his gloved fingertips across the edge of the discolouration, withdrawing when Kuusik flinches. The pad of his index finger floats above the centre, the darkest part, and Kuusik hisses. The area feels hot.

“When did you sustain this injury?”

“That’s the thing,” Kuusik lifts his clothing when prompted, doing the zipper back up. “I never got hurt there.”

“Now, in the heat of the moment, perhaps you didn’t notice or realize —“

“Never,” Kuusik repeats emphatically. “And Dordoni is not so spiteful as to beat me for my misbehaviour.”

“I’ve not much to offer you, then,” Szayel shrugs. “If it gets any worse you may _visit_ my residence, with adequate forewarning and a neighbourly knock to the door. It may be a bruised bone.”

“But I _didn’t —_ “

“Yes, yes, you haven’t done any backflips off roofs recently, I understand. But I am the one here who knows things, am I not?”

“Yeah,” Kuusik moves aside to let Szayel out of the alcove, back into the shambles of the hallway. “If you, uh,” he coughs nervously. “If you wanted to, though, the other thing, sometime. I’d be happy to… repay you… for your help.”

“That’s —“ Szayel barks an abrupt laugh. He pauses at the crumbled wall, giving Kuusik an obvious appraisal over his shoulder. Not hideous. Frizzy, tight blonde curls. A smattering of freckles over his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. 

Szayel has always been weak for freckles. He’d once known a green-haired Fräulein that used to get them burnt into her cheekbones and the slopes of her shoulders, and he’d —  _ugh._ Szayel used to do a lot of things. What he does now is not think about any of it.

“Perhaps another time,” Szayel mumbles, and leaves.

Back in the laboratory, there is a package wrapped in dingy brown sackcloth on a bench, with a note set atop it:

_Szayelaporro Granz,_

_I hope this satisfies your requirements. It would be a pleasure to learn about your work._

_Lord Aizen._

Szayel scoffs. Aizen is keeping tabs. He crumples the note and tosses it into a junk drawer, occupying himself instead with his newest delivery. He likes everything in its place. It’s a shame he still doesn’t know his own.

* * *

Szayel tried to sleep for the first time in thirty-three days, but he was kept awake by what Aizen had unveiled at the Espada meeting, and what Ulquiorra told him. It churned in his head. Ulquiorra, Aizen, the new arrancar swirled around in his lumpy grey matter until he felt nearly ready to spoon it all out.

It’s not like any of them need sleep anyways. Some do more than others. It feels better than being awake and alive. Szayel oscillates between being neurotically occupied to distract himself from the pounding of his heart, and being a glorified vegetable slumped over in a chair. Time, either way, passes. Oh, unfortunate days he counts.

He finds Ulquiorra perched on a shattered piece of aqueduct, arms loosely dangling over his pulled up knees. He wasn’t difficult to find; his reiatsu is thick and cloying even when contained. There’s much more under the surface. It prickles at the hairs on Szayel's arms even under his long sleeves and smock.

“Hello,” Szayel purrs at Ulquiorra, gliding up to sit on the other end of the broken stone structure. “May I?"

Ulquiorra flicks a hand in his general direction as if to say, _you already have._

“Does it not concern you, the addition of a new Espada?”

“Why would it?” Ulquiorra asks.

Szayel bites the inside of his cheek. He may as well be frank. “You never seem particularly concerned with advancing or, at the very least, protecting your rank.”

Ulquiorra looks at Szayel from the corners of his eyes. It’s quite harrowing. Like he shouldn’t be able to see so far to the side.

“Well,” Szayel wobbles a hand in the air, as though that’s explanation enough. “I only mean to say that it may be advantageous to secure a position. Have you no desire to take Tres for yourself?”

It would not be outside the realm of possibility for Cifer to put his foot down, considering the lack of respect afforded to him by Nnoitra or Grimmjow. Literally, perhaps, should it come to it. Even Starrk has the ability to quiet a room by merely opening his drowsy eyes.

Ulquiorra’s lips twitch. “There’s more than one way to be powerful.”

“Hah,” Szayel’s laugh is somehow genuine. “The first logical thing I’ve heard in all my time here. You’re practically a philosopher king. Where do you derive your wit? Your time as a human?”

“No,” Ulquiorra says.

“My days as an adjuchas were dull. I remember more being human than being monstrous.” Szayel thinks, _what's the difference?_

"You're not unlucky," Ulquiorra says.

"You have no memory of being human?"

“No.” How lucky Ulquiorra is.

Szayel thinks he may be the only one in such a predicament.

He remembers the small of his back and the undersides of his thighs sticking to plastic furniture sheets as he was interrogated on his faggothood, like an inquisitorial spider’s web of perversion.

Such lines of questioning have taken up too much of his time. It’s difficult to not define his eras in terms of who spearheaded the investigation into his scandals.

Even immortality itself had to come at a cost. The succinct, sob story of it was that Szayel’s tracks were more tally marks for how many times he got onto his knees, made someone laugh about how he hoped he wouldn’t get necrotizing fasciitis, but then he got sick and he never got much better.

It’s not the insides of his elbows that throb anymore, it’s the little spaces between his toes, and the gaping hole in his thigh where the last dose curdled up in him.

Everything since has been the same way: curdling.

Would he take it all back?

No. No, not really. That’s just the way it went.

Szayel doesn’t have time to regret anything. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, until bright, intangible colours firework up in the dark, so he might focus on something else. He’ll stow the idea of memory replacement away as something to tinker with later. How much more productive would he be if he believed himself a dog in a past life?

It’s worked well enough for Cifer thus far.

“And of your previous exploits as a Vasto Lorde?” Szayel asks.

A tightness appears between Cifer’s shoulders. He’s tightly wound either way, despite his slouchy demeanour and effortless gliding through the halls like a banshee.

“What about it.”

“I’m only wondering what it was like.”

“I listened,” he says.

“Oh?”

Cifer’s eyes flit along the horizon. “To gods.”

Szayel sneers. “ _Please_.”

“I listened and I obeyed.”

“You do little to recover your reputation in my eyes, but do go on.”

“Something reverent speaks to us.” Ulquiorra flicks his fingertips out to the desert. “You only need to understand. It’s not only instincts."

Szayel swallows, but his throat feels numb. There’s something haunting about Ulquiorra’s aura now. “What of the hollow relics in the desert?”

“History is around you. It speaks,” Cifer gestures to the aqueduct. It’s not pure stone; infused with glittery blue veins. “Until the mask is fractured. The internal voice is —“ he seems to choose this word carefully, “painful.”

“An internal voice,” Szayel tries to probe further. “You mean a consciousness.”

“Maybe,” Ulquiorra muses. The hilt of their zanpakutō shines conspicuously as a cloud passes from in front of the moon.“Part of us is always in chains."

_Right_ , Szayel thinks and even his apparently evolved consciousness is haughty, _now they have Aizen’s commandments._

Ulquiorra stands up abruptly and jumps off the aqueduct.

Szayel is startled out of his reverie, barking down, “What — where are you going?”

“I’m done talking,” Ulquiorra doesn’t even look behind himself to say.

“You couldn’t have indicated as much with a little more decorum!? I like to believe we constitute a civil society, even if it’s just between the two of us!”

Ulquiorra shrugs and glimmer away into the horizon. Szayel scrapes a hand through his hair and sighs, yet he feels strangely lighter. The weight of Ulquiorra’s words is becoming more enlightening than horrifying.


	2. avalanches

Control. Just another one of Szayel’s many neuroses.

He decides that if he isn’t privy to everything that occurs in Las Noches, he’s going to get the information himself, one way or another. The origins of the latest unveiled arrancar is first on the list.

Las Noches’ constant upgrades are a mystery as well, but one that interests him far less, and benefits him far more. The laboratory has gained a new floor, deep in the ground and cold enough to store all manner of machinery and electronics. Security is still lax, but Ulquiorra is the least trustworthy person with access and he’s not particularly inconspicuous with a reiatsu presence more oppressive than Grimmjow’s ego.

Person? Do things like Szayel and Ulquiorra, not to mention the enigmatic new Torroja with no clues as to where she materialized from, count as people?

Szayel adjusts the magnifying visor set over his mask and carefully attaches the last magnetic leg to a mechanical bug. He imbues it with some of his reiatsu to activate it, and it sets about exploring its glass petri dish. It crawls onto his fingernail, and Szayel inspects its smooth thorax, twisting and turning to keep it on his thumb as it writhes beneath the lamplight.

A screen next to his spread of tools plays a live feed collected from several hundred microscopic sensors spread across the bug’s body. It will never be without audio or video — and encrypted through his reiatsu. Szayel’s skin tingles with satisfaction. He’s regained the upper hand, and with such minimal effort!

He tinkers with its code one last time before scooping the bug into the wrinkles of his gloves and exiting the laboratory. There is a new lift that deposits him behind a cliff face, on the other side of the ravine, but its lighting strips flicker on even a good day, and so he must still arm himself with the lantern. It sloshes with a full fuel gauge as Szayel rattles back up to the surface.

He needs to find a way to get close to Aizen during the Espada meeting. Of course his creation is not so unsophisticated as to not be able to find its own way to a target, but Szayel puts little faith in his colleagues. All it takes is one wandering gaze to be distracted by a shiny skittering thing on the floor and pounce.

Szayel arrives to more pressing issues.

Such as… the ceiling to the meeting hall being blown off and moonlight streaming onto the table, a long marble slab that is now crumbled and hosting Nnoitra. Dust from the shattered concrete creates a hazy film over the gas lamps. Szayel leaves his lantern in the sand and cautiously steps closer into the fray.

“You cunt! You nasty cunt!” Nnoitra wails as he propels himself off the table, flailing his scythe at Torroja, trapping her against a cracked wall between the two pointed ends of the crescent.

Torroja brandishes her spear, but its glistening tip bounces off Nnoitra’s hierro. She ducks out of Santa Teresa and does not disparage, continuing her assault, determined and focused. But her stabs and slashes at Nnoitra’s legs fail to create a hollow Achilles as they parry across the meeting hall.

Szayel inhales sharply and opens his mouth —

“Gran Rey Cero!” Nnoitra lolls his tongue out and releases a vortex of golden reiatsu, bathing Hueco Mundo in the only light it’s ever seen.

Szayel braces himself behind a reiatsu barrier, but it’s still enough to send him skidding across the sand, which turns into glass beneath his feet. When the spiralling energy dissipates, the desert bears its scars in a path of crystal and instantly formed rock face.

Torroja bursts out of the swirling debris from above, looking worse for wear with her hair in singed clumps and one arm hanging by a mere thread, but nonetheless aiming her spear true.

Ulquiorra’s appearance is preceded only by an overbearing dread. He grabs Torroja by the back of her head and flings her down into the sand, where she rolls over and clutches at her broken body, immediately accepting defeat. Nnoitra has not yet registered the intervention before Ulquiorra has him pinned to the fractured tile floor, tossing Santa Teresa across the room.

“You’re,” Nnoitra wheezes and lurches against Cifer. “Really goin’ to let a skank like that walk around! Pretending she’s more powerful than me! I have’ta… Have’ta —”

“Enough,” Ulquiorra grinds his boot into Nnoitra’s chest. An invisible pressure distorts Nnoitra’s body, keeping him pinned until a sufficient amount of steam has blown through his ears. “Putrid degenerate.”

Now that the coast is clear (another mess cleaned up by others, just as he likes it!), Szayel sweeps in, “Our knight in shining armour!” he croons, leaning down into Ulquiorra’s face. “I daresay I am… glad to see you. One for the records.”

“The fuck?” Grimmjow clambers over a pile of rubble, turning over misshapen chairs with his foot. “Again?”

A small group of fracción assemble, smartly, a good distance from the meeting hall. Starrk peeks into the doorway, one of the few remaining structures, shakes his head, and walks away. Then another, somehow more impressively overwhelming reiatsu joins the fray: Aizen rests one hand on the cracked back of his head table seat.

Szayel’s eyes shine as he sees his opportunity arise. He sidles up to the shinigami and furrows his brow. “Dear Lord Aizen,” he begins forlornly. “We should commence with the meeting as normally and quickly as possible to restore the order of things around here. If it would so please you, I have an idea for preventing such incidents from occurring again…”

“How pleased I am to see you at last eager to share your musings with me. We may speak later.” Aizen locks eyes with Nnoitra, getting up from under the oppressive heel of Ulquiorra’s boot, and the line it makes could be cut with a blunt zanpakutō. Everyone falls into line around the misshapen lump of the table, but the air is thick with dust and crackling energy.

The topics at hand are as dull as usual, serving as thin justification for Aizen to have a crowd ogle his beauty. At one point, an entourage of servants meekly enter the destroyed chasm of a hall and find nowhere to put the tea cups. Aizen makes them wait. Gin is in Hueco Mundo this time, but doesn’t attend the meeting. Szayel knows this because he can hear Gin’s chuckles roll off the dunes like a banshee.

Aizen is disappointed to announce there have been no new adjuchas or Vasto Lorde captured, and Szayel doesn’t believe him, which only renews his vigour for his private mission.

Afterwards, Aizen turns invitingly to Szayel with an open arm, and Szayel bounds forward faster than he thinks Ulquiorra ever has. They occupy a more private corner of the space, but most Espada have understandably fled as soon as Aizen dismissed them.

“As Lord Aizen can see,” Szayel launches into his pitch, pinching the frame of his glasses as though he could adjust his mask. “The powers of some Espada are too great to remain unleashed. I can see and appreciate the efforts of yourself to construct a seat of power and civilization in Hueco Mundo! Thus, we cannot allow it to be challenged by unruly, self-serving individuals!”

For a moment, Aizen only smiles.

“Szayelaporro,” he says softly. Almost sincerely. He grips Szayel’s shoulder, his thumb massaging a comforting circle. “I did not know you were so committed to my mission for Hueco Mundo. I am touched by your loyalty and understanding.”

Szayel feels his eyes glaze over for a moment, locked into Aizen’s steely stare. He feels hot under the collar. “Yes,” he whispers, “ _yes,_ ” more authoritatively. “I share your creative and constructive inclinations. It pains me to see it destroyed.”

“What do you propose?”

“Until now I have been a rather passive participant in hollow research… and without meaning to denigrate the resources I’m sure Lord Aizen has assigned to this purpose, there has been little progress in finding and analyzing adjuchas or Vasto Lorde. If I may devise technologies for the safe capture and study of these specimen…”

“And how do you see this solving the outbursts of our comrades?”

“Well, by virtue of capturing hollow I would need to find ways to subdue them. We may control more powerful ranks similarly.”

“Ah,” Aizen’s smile doesn’t slip. “But you would have to make the Espada agree to such terms. After all, how is it fair if Ulquiorra were to be suppressed, but not yourself?”

Szayel thinks it wouldn’t be the only thing suppressing Ulquiorra.

“Certainly, it may incur a kind of security dilemma. Ulquiorra would no doubt be concerned if he was to be at the same level as myself, and I devised a means to overpower and kill him. The suppression must be carefully balanced so as not to smooth over our power differentials, but still keep Las Noches in tact. However, it works in the opposite direction as well. Powerful Espada may be comforted in relinquishing an amount of their power to you, if it guarantees their protection from those above them. Ulquiorra would have more reason to fear Starrk any day of the week than myself.”

“How fascinating,” Aizen says wistfully, “to see a great mind at work.”

Szayel raises his fingers to his lips to daintily, but ineffectually, hide a shy laugh. “What inspiring company you are, Lord Aizen,” he coos, touching Aizen’s forearm. A tiny pill bug skitters from Szayel’s glove and down the hem of Aizen’s long sleeve, its only giveaway a metallic glint in the rickety moonlight.

“I authorize this project. You should have someone with you when you capture hollow. Torroja would be up to the task.”

“Thank you, Lord Aizen.”

Aizen makes his leave, but turns with a thoughtful expression. “And Szayelaporro?”

“Yes?”

“Paper is quite difficult to come upon in these parts. You may find other uses for it rather than crumpling it.”

Szayel grits his teeth. “My apologies, Lord Aizen.”

Lord Aizen can authorize himself to go choke on a big fat cock.

Szayel rushes back to his laboratory as quickly as possible without drawing undue attention. He suddenly feels like he has eyes on him, prickling the hairs on the back of his neck, but his predatory instincts tell him there’s no one there. He seals the laboratory hatch and barely catches the handle of his lantern on its hook before he’s sliding into his chair and booting up the live video feed.

It’s black and white, and a bit fuzzy, because he had only so long to put it together without Aizen being suspicious of the requisition list, but he watches the screen intensely. Aizen is walking from the meeting room, speaking with Gin judging by the timbre of the other voice, but the desert wind wafting through the blasted open walls obscures their words.

Szayel chews on his lip anxiously, his eyebrows tight.

“Get out of there,” he mutters to himself.

Almost as if on command, Aizen and Gin turn left and stop outside a maintenance closet.

_“Shall we take a look?”_ Aizen asks Gin.

Gin just grins.

Szayel hunches forward, squinting to make out the details.

Aizen and Gin enter a room so dark it becomes difficult to tell if it’s in fact a small closet or a vast room hiding behind the door. Until something glitters in the middle of the room. A floating crystal that slowly drifts from corner to corner and side to side in a glass container.

The camera angle shakes, the feed cuts out.

Szayel launches himself back in his chair, his heart pounding in his chair, and he feels trapped in the headlights of the blackened screen. For a moment he doesn’t register what happened, much less what to do.

Uh-oh.

He jams his thumb into the monitor’s power button. Maybe if he turns it off, it didn’t happen, and it will go away. Who’s to say anything bad just happened, anyways? His technology is yet untested. It needs tweaks.

Yes. Tweaks.

Szayel grips his hair with both hands and exhales deeply. 

An alarm chirps off to the side on a switchboard. Someone has entered from the canyon and is coming down the steps. Szayel starts looking for an exit plan, because there is certainly nothing good approaching. It’s most likely Gin, coming to smile at him and rip his head clean off. Maybe Ulquiorra, to do the same, but in a broody, kind of sexy way.

Then the reiatsu reading returns as quite low, compared to those imagined assassins, and instead of being relieved Szayel is only that much more concerned that his murder will be messy and unskilled by someone who can barely crunch through his hierro.

“Who’s there?” Szayel asks over the staticky intercom in the foyer outside the laboratory.

“Torroja,” answers back. He buzzes her in.

He’s never actually spoken to her in any great capacity before, but he supposes he’d need to one way or another if he’s to take her along on his misadventures, as per Aizen’s request.

Torroja is nearly as tall as him, with ochre skin and deep crimson hair that catches purple highlights in the stark white lighting of his laboratory. Her mask sprouts up from underneath her jaw over the left side of her head like a vulture’s crest.

A pair of flared trousers sway at her ankles. Szayel thinks of drug mule discothèques, and his arms itch.

“I need your help,” Torroja says.

Szayel raises an eyebrow. “Everyone does. And I provide a variety of services. You’ll have to be a bit more specific.”

“After Nnoitra and I fought,” she pauses. “I was recovering as expected… Let me start at the beginning. My hierro is quite strong. I’m able to regenerate, and I’ve never had problems with that before.”

Torroja unzips her jacket to her collarbones, revealing a caldera of burnt skin that would be crusted, if not completely healed, were it not for the blood still actively oozing from it. A patchwork of bruises fill the rest of her skin.

She adds, “it hurts to move. Like I’m ancient.”

Szayel quickly snaps on a pair of gloves (two, actually) and probes at the wound with a metal tool. “I am tempted to say that you’ve simply not given it enough time to heal, but…”

“Regeneration isn’t that slow.”

“Certainly not… Do you have any other similar injuries?”

Torroja shrugs her top off one shoulder, wincing as she exposes her arm. It’s the one he saw Nnoitra nearly blast clean off, looking better, but not completely. Around the back is a red, scabby seam, but the front half of the limb is still exposed to the bone. Szayel can see no active regeneration. He also spies a swollen lymph node in her underarm. Highly unusual.

Szayel furrows his brow. “It reminds me, a few days ago. A fracción showed me his bruises.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he would have reason to be concerned if he could regenerate and did not know where they came from.”

“Yeah…”

“Let me take a sample. I’ll keep you informed.” Szayel collects strips of skin from her shoulder and arm into small glass jars and scribbles a label on. He leaves his tools in a bleach bath to clean more thoroughly once she’s left.

“What happened to the fracción?” Torroja carefully pulls her top back on.

“I haven’t the slightest. He never came back.”

“Huh,” she snorts. “So much for keeping tabs on your patients. I feel so safe in your care.”

Szayel puts his hands up defensively. “Now, now, I wouldn’t call anything I do _care._ I’m merely curious. If the two intersect, so be it, as long as my lust for knowledge is sated.”

“Why don’t you go check on the fracción then, if you want to know more?”

“I’m not a doctor who pays house calls.”

Torroja grins. “It’ll be fun.”

“No, it won’t be.”

“I’ll kill you,” Torroja steps closer into Szayel’s space, attempting to loom menacingly over him.

Unimpressed, he looks her up and down with a sneer. “You’ve just shown me your wounds and now you’re trying to threaten me?”

“I could, even like this.”

“Why do you want to do this so badly?”

She bites the inside of her cheek and falls silent for a moment. “I want you to tell me I won’t die. I don’t want to give that kind of victory to Nnoitra.”

Szayel sighs, dramatically, and with a flourish as he trashes his rubber gloves. “You have a point. I would have to hear his incessant gloating for decades. Fine. We’ll go find Kuusik.”

Torroja grins and waits by the lift while Szayel puts on his cape and stashes a small package of first aid equipment in the wide pocket of his trousers. Truth be told, he’s not entirely sure where Kuusik makes most of his time, but he’ll chance Dordoni’s tower. Either Kuusik is there, or they can ask after his whereabouts.

Dordoni’s tower is an attache to the most central node of buildings, and also the most developed. It’s both a benefit and a curse: the electricity is the most reliable outside of Szayel’s laboratory, but the traffic is higher and it’s in closer proximity to where Aizen is more likely to wander. Some of them want that, though. Some of them like it, and believe.

The hallways are tinged green under the fluorescents. It puts a twinge in Szayel’s eye and pressure on his temples.

“What’s your theory?” Torroja pipes up.

“My what?”

“On what’s happening to me.”

“It would be a hypothesis, not a theory, you ignoramus. I would require some more information before I truly go through the motions of testing this phenomenon. You see, it’s a method of meticulous steps to come to the most reliable and scientific of conclusions. Never mind all these alternative epistemologies, you’ll never find the same thing twice, and if things are left to _subjectivities…_ Ugh!”

Torroja stops and squints at something over Szayel’s shoulder. “Hey,” she mumbles, gently interrupting.

“What could possibly be more important than me—”

Her hand steers Szayel to look at the end of the hall. There’s a puddle of something dark and murky dribbling left around the corner. Torroja is already walking towards it, crouching down over the spill. _Don’t_ withers in Szayel’s throat because he’s curious as to what will happen if Torroja _does._

“It smells horrible,” she says, rearing back from it.

“Sniff it some more, why don’t you,” Szayel drawls.

He would say he keeps a safe distance as he leans over the puddle, but he hasn’t the faintest idea what it could be, and thus can’t possibly hazard a safe distance. It may be as harmless as making sure he doesn’t end up with a mouthful of it, or he will die of exposure within ten minutes. Some lines are finer than others.

“Touch it,” Szayel says.

Torroja makes a face at him. “Excuse me?”

“Locate, on your body, using your acute mental faculties, an extremity of some sort — preferably a finger — and stick it into the strange black substance on the floor. For science.”

She turns back to the puddle. “It doesn’t look like it’s doing anything bad to the floor.”

“Sure.”

“So do you think it’s not acidic or something?”

“ _Sure_.”

Torroja heaves out a breath, “Okay, whatever,” and puts the tip of her gloved finger into the puddle.

Nothing particularly happens, except her immediate removal of it and a disgusted noise in response; “It’s _warm._ ”

“Warm?” Szayel asks.

“Like blood,” Torroja replies. She tries to shake the substance off her finger, but it coats the glove strangely — not dripping or absorbing and staining, but like a wax mold. “Uh,” she says when it won’t come off after another attempt.

“Take your glove off, without turning it inside-out,” he tells her. She pulls the glove off by the other fingertips, leaving it on the ground. Szayel scoops it up onto a pen produced from his coat pocket, keeping it at arm’s length to inspect.

“Uh,” Torroja says again.

“Have you been rendered speechless? Connect your brain to your mouth, dear.”

“Nothing,” she says. “I thought it got on my finger.”

“Did it?”

“No,” she swipes her hand against her pant leg. “No.”

“Hmm,” but Szayel doesn’t press. “How much further does the trail go?”

Torroja takes a great step across the puddle and inches around the corner of the hall. She says nothing about investigating any further, or, answering in any terms what Szayel had asked, so he abandons the pen and glove to follow her with a dramatic sigh he fully intends for her to hear.

But Torroja isn’t in the hall.

There’s a dead-end and a slightly ajar door on the righthand.

Slippery bitch.

The black substance makes piddling trails here too, but none as large as the first. The further down Szayel follows it, the fresher it looks — bubbling, frothy, not yet settled. Just as he’s about to edge into the gap between the door and its jamb, his sight is consumed not by the pitch dark room, but Torroja’s frenzied stare as she’s shouldering past him.

“Don’t fucking go in there,” the words come out of her like a shaky whistle.

“I can’t imagine what could be —”

“Don’t,” she repeats. “Don’t fucking go in. Get someone else to deal with it.”

Szayel curls his lip at her, “My God, you’re actually scared. Of what, the dark? Get over yourself,” and opens the door.

He gathers a bit of reiatsu at his fingertips, just at the point of crackling and charged to release. It burns electric pink trails into his retinas more than it does provide any useful light, but it’s all he has. Accursed modernity, that he no longer had any reason to carry a creaking gas lamp at all times.

With his other hand, Szayel feels around for any objects in his vicinity. He paws blindly around the edge of a sleek cabinet, his fingers skimming over a metal tray with tea dishes.

Something whimpers in the dark.

Torroja is nowhere to be seen when Szayel glances over his shoulder. So he presses on further into the room, guiding himself by the cabinet and then the backrest of a sofa.

Something gurgles.

And then it’s quiet again.

When he passes the sofa, the only sense that Szayel can rely on is that of natural hollows: to find the source of a very unnaturally pulsating reiatsu somewhere at the end of the room. He tiptoes around more of the black fluid, but here it’s been smeared and dragged in one direction rather than in puddles.

The trail leads to what can only be described as a lump of flesh tucked up against the wall.

“Shit,” Szayel whispers, takes a few stumbling steps back.

The thrumming of reiatsu is intensifying, the valleys between each spike becoming shorter and shorter, and the highs nearly unbearable. At the greatest pressure, perhaps even stronger than some of the Quinto. Reiatsu flows in vicious flames off the body — he supposes it’s a body — until it plateaus at a steady hum.

For a moment, it looks as if the body is moving, expanding like ribs do with a breath. But then it doesn’t stop swelling, distending unevenly in the middle and at the limbs.

The body explodes.

Putrid globs of black fluid ooze onto the wall it was pressed up against. The force of it jolts the body onto its back. Its torso looks like the exit hole of a bullet — muscle, bone, fabric bent outwards and dripping the same vile substance. It sparks with residue reiatsu fading into the atmosphere.

Szayel’s throat is dry when he swallows his cowardice and inches towards the corpse. He approaches from the top, to unveil some of the mystery and see its face…

Oh, sweet Kuusik.


	3. myxomatosis

Cifer stashes his hands in his pockets as a gaggle of attendants wheel Kuusik’s splatter away. He asks Szayel, “why did you call me?”

_Because you’re the first person I thought of,_ is decidedly not a good answer. So, “I wanted Aizen to be informed as soon as possible,” is his reply.

With only the two of them left, Szayel implores: “Say something. Say something about this incredibly mysterious and shocking development, because I can assure you I have never once considered this to be within the realm of possibility.”

Ulquiorra blinks at him.

Szayel wants to reach out to grab Ulquiorra’s arm, knowing his predilection for vanishing wordlessly, but he clenches his fists instead. “Surely you have some sort of mystic, arcane wisdom about the philosophy of exploding arrancar.”

Nothing.

“Your obtuseness is truly frustrating.”

“Aizen wants to see you,” is all Ulquiorra says before he continues his imperial march through Las Noches. Ulquiorra’s preference to walk rather than dart around like a maniac on amphetamines signals something about his chokehold on power, but there is still energy and potentiality rippling under the surface that is often forgotten. It’s not forgetting that is terrifying, but remembering after the fact, and looking back on all the opportunities one inched towards the precipice with folly.

Szayel’s heart hammers as he raps his knuckles on the double doors to Aizen’s throne room. A servant pulls them open to reveal Aizen leisurely posed in his seat like an emperor-despot. At least Rome had lovely countryside and aquatic terrain.

Aizen smiles, even while he sighs. His loose waves fall over the frames of his glasses. “I try to exercise a great deal of patience with you, Szayel Aporro, to cultivate the best out of you. If you wanted to know about something so badly, you could have just asked. I may not have told you. But at least it would have been more ethical than bugging me, mm?”

Szayel feels like his consciousness is floating above him, a guillotine acting on behalf of Aizen. That is the most nefarious thing of all; self-censorship. There always feel to be eyes on him, even if there aren’t really. It defies hollow biology, which would detect the most minute field of energy. Szayel is frustrated by how biology yet constrains his breadth of action. How does Aizen transcend?

"I didn't mean to imply that Lord Aizen is unduly withholding things from us. But as your primary researcher, I find myself to be unduly uninformed.” Szayel is not nearly as apologetic as he acts, but he has also learned that exposing his soft stomach to authority is the best way to save his skin and advance some of his interests.

"Oh?"

“Well, I am by duty a trustworthy member of your personnel.” Szayel swallows. The taste is faintly vile. "It stands that not everyone can be trusted. Not for lack of loyalty, but of intelligence. What can you expect to happen if you give the truth to those who don't know what to do with it? There must be a method by which to know what those beneath you know, and how they know it.”

Aizen doesn't say anything for a minute. Then he uncrosses his legs and stands, descending the stone steps to stand in front of Szayel.

“First I gave you leave to find a way to stop the Espada from fighting each other. You took a foot from that inch. Now I expect you to propose something that would address both concerns.”

“I beg Aizen-sama’s pardon —“

“— No need to be coy.”

“Your range is… lacking.”

“You needn’t pace yourself. Explain.”

Szayel’s hands fumble behind his back. “I propose that I could create something to allow you to watch over the entirety of Las Noches, whilst simultaneously containing it. Walls only go so far, given we are not expecting external attack, but an overhead protection to limit what occurs inside those walls would be more appropriate. By this I only mean that, with such a powerful collection of arrancar, you run no risk of losing it from any outside attack…”

“But it would be in my best interest to keep it from destroying itself.”

“Yes, Lord Aizen.” Szayel somehow thinks that Aizen has been waiting all along for the suggestion. If it came from someone within the proposed prison, the jailer wouldn’t seem a paranoiac, would he?

Aizen’s smile somehow has room to widen. “My patience is well rewarded. You’re a marvel, Szayel Aporro. Please, prepare a formal blueprint. I trust you have something in mind already, we can see to this matter together.”

"I would recognize you and your creations anywhere, Szayelaporro," Aizen says softly when Szayel has a foot out the door. ”You have a very sweet smell."

"I do so try to maintain good hygiene," Szayel grits out between his teeth.

* * *

Szayel has received a steady influx of arrancar in the laboratory since Kuusik was found. Some are without any ailments and waste his time droning on and on about something brainless. More are afflicted. He has a moderate stack of cards documenting each visit and symptom shown.

Thus far, he has documented the following pattern: bruise-like discolouration which is hot to the touch and may be associated with a rash, muscle aches, joint stiffness, swollen lymph nodes, aversion to bright light, weakened hierro if possessed, uncontrollable bleeding from wounds, and black vomit. Needless to say, Szayel is deeply troubled by a sudden mass of effectively nullified soldiers.

Seven arrancar have reported symptoms to him, a mix of fracción and numeros and, of course, Torroja. She’s been positively infuriating the whole time, and Szayel now considers it a blessing that he hasn’t had the time to take her out on hollow hunting expeditions lest she spend the whole trip whining his ear off: _Oh, Szayel, I feel so weak, everything hurts, I’m so close to death, this is terrifying. Oh, Szayel, please suddenly spawn magical powers and cure me._

Well, he’s trying. There is magic for some things, like the after life and becoming an incredibly powerful spiritual being of pure condensed hatred and evil, but of course nothing for constructive things. If only he could put Kuusik back together again to properly observe the progression of his affliction, but he’s currently a bucket of black sludge in the cadaver refrigerator.

Szayel did catch a few measly hollow on his own from the trip wire traps he placed around the ravine. He knows really only one thing as of now, that arrancar are created when the hollow mask is fractured, but he has never seen it occur and it is proving difficult to do it himself.

The first hollow he took a hammer to, just for the sake of it. Results as expected.

The next four he approached more cautiously, employing a variety of methods. He chipped away at masks carefully, taking small pieces, but those ones all eventually bled out. A laser cauterized the wound, but didn’t turn the hollow into anything but wisps of smoke when he had to cero it out of its misery.

“Why are you doing this?” Ulquiorra asks just the question that keeps Szayel up at night (and morning, afternoon, twilight, vespers…) when he comes one day with Yammy to pick up the latest requisition list. He lurks over a caged hollow no larger than the size of a cat with a splintered mask.

Szayel grips the arm rests of a chair he slumped into, sighing and rolling his head back to stretch out a knot formed between his shoulder blades. He’s been hunched over all manner of gore and useless data for days. “The only connection between all the affected arrancar is that they have no memory of being an adjuchas or gillian, or even having their masks removed. It’s almost as though they appeared out of nowhere. Thus I’m following my intuition that they may be artificially created — that they do not necessarily need to break their own masks. ”

“They would remember you breaking it instead,” Ulquiorra challenges. He holds out his open hand expectantly.

“Certainly, but you needn’t remind me of the failures of my own logic. I am well aware, just as I am aware of it as my only option.” Szayel floats the sheets of paper into Ulquiorra’s hand, a routine transaction. “Don’t you think there might be a better method of collecting this? Something more automated? Telepathic?”

“Alright!” Yammy booms, stomping in from around the corner. “Enough yakking, we got the list! Ulquiorra, can we go now?”

Ulquiorra’s gaze shifts from the writhing hollow to holding eye contact with Szayel for a moment before he follows Yammy to the exit. Sharp, but lifeless.

“Cifer,” Szayel lunges out of his seat. “I know you have Aizen’s ear. I would appreciate some discretion when it comes to this matter.”

He doesn’t get a reply, but he wasn’t expecting nor wanting one. Of course he knows whatever he leaves out in the open will be reported on, the same for the orders he puts in. If Aizen has some clarity into what it’s all for, it might serve the both of them well. Szayel will get the necessary support for his endeavours and Aizen will be satisfied with believing he knows everything Szayel does.

Anyways, Szayel sees Ulquiorra more often than others might glance upon his spectral figure, and he likes the view.

Truth be told, he’s not sure what compels him to the cuarta. There’s nothing especially reprehensible about him beyond a few particularities of personality like his mopey disposition, the fact he often ignores Szayel, and all the drooling over Aizen. But even these are Szayel’s own exaggerations. Maybe it’s that Ulquiorra is a tabula rasa: mysterious and quiet enough for him to exert his own beliefs on what and who Ulquiorra is in the absence of any contradicting evidence. Szayel, and everyone else for that matter, has constructed their own conception of Ulquiorra such that the real Ulquiorra need not be analyzed.

Maybe that’s just another projection. Szayel doesn’t like it when things go unknown.

The caged hollow has stopped moving, and its reiatsu pulse has flattened. Szayel sighs, watching its corpse flutter away into bits of ash.

* * *

All the inhabitants of Las Noches had been assembled for the unveiling of the most recent update to the landscape: the completion of the central hub. The meeting hall has been refurbished after Nnoitra and Torroja’s brawl, and an intricate maze of fully enclosed hallways now connects several common rooms, servants’ and spare quarters, and the throne room. Work thus commenced on reaching outlying towers and Espada residences with underground walkways next. Szayel rejoices the fact that there is no longer a need to carry his gas lamp; whatever powers the internal lighting and infrastructure of their burgeoning city has proven to be reliable. The fluorescent and strip lighting sparkles across the sleek purple and green tile fashioning each room.

“Please gather in the meeting room,” Aizen claps his hands together softly. “There is one last addition to our city.”

When the doors close behind the Espada, Szayel stands to address a clearly bored pack of murderous gremlins. It doesn’t matter much; things will occur with or without their consent, and thus is the benefit of signing one’s life away to an authoritarian power!

“In addition to these refurbishments, I have created and will be implementing a dome over the entirety of our expanding city of Las Noches. To distinguish its borders, it will simulate perpetual daylight. Specifically, I have attuned it to exactly 1:32 post meridiem with a solar angle of 45 degrees…” He clears his throat. “At any rate, the dome will serve several functions. First, it will protect Las Noches from outside threat. This is accomplished through its second function of being a supervisory instrument for Lord Aizen. He will be able to see all that occurs beneath the dome and along its periphery.

Third, it will protect us from ourselves. No longer will we fear the destruction of all we may hold dear! That is, our own lives and status. Two things are forbidden beneath the dome: any use of Gran Rey Cero, and any Espada ranked cuarta and above entering resurreción. Doing so will constitute a direct violation of Lord Aizen’s wishes and you will be regarded as a target for elimination. Remember,” Szayel taps his finger to his glasses. “We see everything.”

“Thank you, Szayelaporro.” Aizen slurps his oolong. “I trust we will all benefit from and appreciate the hard work Szayelaporro has put into making our city truly a seat of power and order. Are there any questions?”

No one seems to care, but Torroja shifts in her seat uncomfortably. Her reiatsu spikes.

“Torroja,” Aizen gestures so as to beckon her. “Do you find something troublesome with Szayelaporro’s presentation?”

“N—no…” She manages to choke out. Blood splats onto the mirror clean glass table. It runs out of her tear ducts and ears. Grimmjow and Aaroniero, who sit on either side of her, get up from their chairs and back away from her. “I don’t… know what…”

She shrieks when her eyes explode. Black pus oozes down her fingers as she gouges at her sockets, feebly and haphazardly like she’s losing control over her own body. She tenses and spasms in rhythm with the rollercoaster pattern her reiatsu is travelling on, until she slams back in her seat, toppling it and erupting into a geyser of gore and pitch black viscera slugged onto the marble columns behind her.

A heavy silence falls over the meeting hall. There is no sound but the drip of what used to be Torroja onto the floor, and Ulquiorra, the last to still be seated at the table, unfazed as he brings in two servant arrancar.

Barragan louses past Szayel out of the meeting hall, grumbling something along the lines of, “how will you hear with a dome…” and Szayel thinks he’s absolutely lost his mind and hasn’t the slightest grip on what just occurred.

“Please do not be alarmed. This will be resolved at once,” Aizen attempts to assuage the rapidly fleeing Espada. Some are already peeling off their clothing, like it’s contaminated. It very well might be. Szayel follows, covering his mouth and nose with the crook of his arm. First, he catches Ulquiorra overseeing a clean up scene of déjà vu, and he supposes he will need to dictate the contamination protocol… but Grimmjow and Nnoitra are coming straight towards him looking like a fire was lit under their asses, weaving through a gaggle of flustered fracción.

“Stay away from that thing,” Grimmjow slams his hand into Szayel’s back congenially, making him feel smaller than ever under the weight of it.

Szayel adjusts his glasses. “From our comrade who just ruined the brand new upholstery? Yes, it smells quite rancid indeed.”

“Ulquiorra,” Nnoitra clarifies with a sneer.

Grimmjow adds, “the little freak,” as if it wasn’t clear enough.

“I know you’re quite territorial, Grimmjow,” Szayel shrugs off his heavy palm. Ugh. It felt sweaty. 

“But spare me the details of whatever you and Ulquiorra enjoy the… _freakiness_ of.”

“He’s fucked up.” The derision either went in one of Grimmjow’s ears and out the other, or he has a thicker skin than previously believed. “None of us give a shit about each other. We’re all here getting our own. But Ulquiorra is the only lunatic who would do it all for Aizen. That’s real danger. Something ain’t right in that head.”

“Oh? It seems more to me that Ulquiorra and Starrk should host nap time together, given how slowly they move.”

Nnoitra snorts. “Once saw Ulquiorra fly across half’a L’Noches before I could blink. The breeze he kicked up shredded up one’a Dordoni’s. Only found the blood on the ground.”

_Unrealistic and doubtful,_ but Szayel bites the inside of his cheek. His death drive isn’t particularly powerful today. He has enough to worry about.

“I repeat: stay away,” Grimmjow snarls before he and Nnoitra continue down the hall. “When I beat his ass, I don’t need anything or anyone in my way. Just say good riddance. You might as well stay away from everyone after that.”

If only Szayel didn’t like fucked up things.

Szayel walks right up to Ulquiorra, because he detests being told what to do.

“Cifer, I’ve never had the enjoyment of seeing your tower. Why, I count one for each Espada except yourself. Certainly you haven’t been swindled from privacy? You can’t be lurking all the time, now. And more practically,” Szayel punctuates with a pointed finger. "I require an inspection to determine its architectural soundness. For the dome, of course."

Ulquiorra looks like he won’t deign a reply for a moment, but then he shifts one foot out to start walking. “Come.”

Szayel’s mood recovers fantastically. He was hardly expecting an invitation right this moment. It seems, in a moment of self-awareness, like a particularly bad moment to be leaving, but everything is novel and frankly incomprehensible.

He is led to the very end of the complex where an inconspicuous door hides a spiralling staircase, more akin to a maintenance access than fit for Aizen’s best dog.

“What do you make of what just, ahem, transpired?” Szayel asks.

“Nothing,” Ulquiorra replies, infuriatingly. Well, neither does Szayel! But he’s going to have to be the one to make something of it anyways, isn’t he!

At the top of the stairs, there is a small square room with just enough space for a bed, desk and chair, and a rack where two extra uniform are hanging. Besides a limp tapestry hanging above the bed, there are no decorations. On the wall opposite where they entered is a rectangular balcony framed by two tall cathedral shaped windows.

Szayel doesn’t know what he expected. He almost feels sadness for Ulquiorra, who truly has nothing. The bed linen are unwrinkled and all the furniture is caked with cobwebs and sand blown in from the open terrace. There is nothing to indicate he has any hobbies or diversions.

“So,” Szayel imprints his hand into the dust on the desk. Even that is characterless, given his gloves. “What do you do here?”

Ulquiorra stands in the middle of the room like he’s never been here before. It’s a miracle he even knew the way. “Nothing.”

“Yes, I can see that. I was trying to make conversation.”

Ulquiorra looks over his shoulder at the windows. “I watch sometimes."

“Let’s watch then!” Ulquiorra follows Szayel onto the terrace gloomily. Granted, it is scenic. Szayel can see the wide sweeping desert terrain; the canyon above his laboratory, the mild slopes of sand that seem to endlessly repeat. The moon is perfectly centred in the sky, and it will be a shame that the dome will obscure it. “Not much to see, hm? I can see why you prefer to keep tabs on whatever interesting things the others and I are doing.”

“It’s more interesting to Aizen than to me.”

“I find your loyalty beyond comprehension. But I dare to also admit that part of it is that I am irrevocably jealous of your sincerity.” Szayel leans over to rest his elbows on the stone edge of the balcony, squishing his cheek into his palm. “I find my soul inadequate compared to yours, not just because there is nothing to fill it with, but because there is no space for anything else to fill. I have already decided what I value — and it all happens to be the sorts of things that got me into this predicament. The inhumanity of my fascinations! But, at any rate, I far prefer luxury and degeneracy to higher obligations. Just so, I’ve been given an eternity to pursue my hedonism.”

Szayel has come to read moments like this: Ulquiorra’s slow blinks and downward gaze, the piece of hair falling across his nose signifying he’s basking in a contemplative silence rather than about to walk away.

“You misunderstand me.”

Hah! _Au contraire!_ Szayel wouldn’t boast without reason. Well, he would, on principle of being the only person in the ranks with an IQ above that of a mollusk, but that’s besides the point.

Szayel laughs. “You’re wrong! But please enlighten me and I will pretend to consider it.”

“I admire Aizen not because he filled void, but because he created it within me. He destroyed want."

Szayel raises an eyebrow. He wasn’t expecting that. “Do you mean to tell me that you want nothing? I know you to be an ascetic, of course, you look like you’ve never eaten a single meal in any realm of existence nor learned what a hairbrush is, but… you can hardly call yourself a living being without claiming any desire or interests.”

“Impulse isn’t the same as desire,” Cifer says. “Desire destroyed all of us. I owe my success to getting rid of it.”

“Nothing? You desire absolutely nothing?” He moves closer to Ulquiorra, who watches him leerily. The balcony is awfully small. They’re already nearly in one of the corners.

“Nothing,” Ulquiorra echoes.

“Then how do you decide what to do, hm? How do you measure success?” Szayel extends his arm to block Ulquiorra in, placing a hand on the balustrade.

“I think.”

“But if you have no end goal you desire, there’s no calculation to arrive at a choice of action?”

Szayel watches Ulquiorra’s eyes flicker up and down. He moves closer. Their legs brush against each other.

“Hubris makes you believe you are at the centre of decision-making in your existence.”

“Predestination?” Szayel whispers.

“If it’s what you want to call it,” Ulquiorra replies.

“God help me, then.” Szayel slips his hand behind Ulquiorra’s head and kisses him firmly. It feels like forever but Ulquiorra doesn’t move away.

Szayel exhales heavily into the space between their lips, his fingers twitching, tangled in thick hair. He asks, “Do you know how to suck a cock, or am I going to end up a eunuch if I let you anywhere near it?”

The _look_ that Ulquiorra gives him.

He’ll be thinking about it for a while. It really shouldn’t do what it does for him.

But when all he can picture is foamy sea green hair and hazel eyes, he knows he’s in more and different trouble than he thought. He is sickened by the thrill he never abandoned of tainting something pure, deified, and not meant for him.

There are so many things to remember about _her_ , but these are the ones Szayel’s mind wanders to. It’s obscene, how sentimental death has made him.

Maybe not death, the withering voice of his conscience pipes up, maybe murder.

Oh, stuff it.

They both did what they had to do in the anarchic circumstances of their brutish, dead-end lives.

But he can still imagine what her hair felt like tickling between his fingers and the softness of her cheeks before it was all drenched with sweat and bubbly spittle, convulsing out of her as she death rattled through her final high. It was painful, the whole way through. He knows.

Szayel would ask if it’s not punishment enough, to have felt it all, to know what true pain is. But he thinks his current station in the afterlife is more to do with the fundamentals of it: he doesn’t remember how much he put into the needle. Or he doesn’t want to remember.

Like he doesn’t want to remember how many times he reused them, feeling _good_ and feeling _immortal._ He was infallible, until he buried everyone he knew and then had no one left to do the same for himself.

The fact remains… Nelliel used to smile at him.

Szayel used to make her smile.


	4. traumfrau

There is a new reality to face after Torroja’s public self-execution: Espada with a modicum of self-awareness understand that they are not immune to the mysterious affliction ravaging Las Noches by virtue of being more powerful than others. They all stay away from each other. If only Szayel knew earlier that this would be the solution to keep them from mindlessly committing homicide.

Szayel ponders the ease with which a horde of cannibals had rolled over and surrendered to the whims of a human soul. Someone who was not even one of them. Does that make Aizen, conceptually, more appealing?

Well, he has pondered this for a long while in his self-isolation.

It’s not just that Aizen was the one to create the rules. That is power in itself, to form zeitgeist. It is even more powerful to break it and still claim legitimacy. Aizen need barely lift a finger before Espada are throwing themselves into their towers and locking the doors, all to preserve the peace and the city they had no ownership over anyways.

Szayel’s new reality is that the very dome he installed is also to his detriment; he is being watched and constrained in the same ways. Yes, it is true there is a monitoring capability. Aizen and his entourage are too perceptive to not notice if it had not been included in the blueprints, or did not function. Szayel knows there is a camera room, but its exact location within the eternal sunshine is unknown to him. He provided its specifications for construction, but it was to Aizen’s discretion and exclusive knowledge where. Most things are deferred to the highest authority of this land.

Beyond this, Szayel thinks there are ghosts of ghosts. He often finds misplaced items in his laboratory when he’s only been in the other room or sleeping (a luxury he can sometimes afford when he grows tired of the same scenery).

He has this mystery on his mind as he is stirred from his work by a garganta broadcast materializing next to his desk. He sets down a pipette to see Yammy and Ulquiorra trudging through reishi on their way from the human world. There’d been a blip of something powerful on some reiatsu sensors he had set up long ago…

“Turned out to be nothin’!” Yammy somehow crushes Szayel’s spirits even further. But at least nothing ended up in Aizen’s hands before he could get to it. “Sure those things even work right?”

“Indubitably,” Szayel snaps.

“Well, I bashed the thing a few times to get its screws back in order!” Yammy roars with laughter.

Szayel pinches the bridge of his nose. He doesn’t have time or the spare mental load to deal with this. “I implore you to not tinker with my things. But, if you must, at least leave them in the same place you found them so as to give the reasonable impression that your greasy fingerprints aren’t smeared all over them.”

Yammy puffs out his chest indignantly. “The hell are you on about now? I don’t touch your creepy shit. I don’t know what half of it does.”

Szayel pushes the bridge of his glasses reflexively. “Is that so.”

“Yeah, and—” the broadcast fizzles away just in time.

He rubs his eyes. No, of course it wouldn’t have been Yammy. He would have heard that lumbering beast of burden long before he managed to turn a corner and flee. There’s something more skillful at play here.

The only reason Szayel accused him was because of how attached at the hip he is to… Ulquiorra?

Not Ulquiorra.

* * *

Szayel has two problems.

Problem one: Las Noches is closing in on him, squeezing and wringing him from both ends like his pulsing arteries. He has been summoned to the announcement of a new Espada, but not in the great hall this time. Aizen assembles his little knight pieces in a common room and specifies there to be no one else present. Szayel sits in a tall, high-backed sofa flush to the wall, because he feels a peculiar stinging at the back of his head whenever he leaves his laboratory, and he doesn’t need anyone watching him fail to control his trembling hands. Ulquiorra stands next to him at the end of the sofa. Perhaps a week ago Szayel would lewdly try to get him to sit on his knee. Today he flexes his jaw and tries not to look at the exposed sliver of zanpakutō on his hip. Slouchy just like Ulquiorra, slung low on his hip. He need not reach far to wield it.

But when is Ulquiorra not a weapon in himself?

That is the cloying danger in the air, at all times. It’s as if their swords and their numbers mean anything more than a psychological damper on their tempers, but there is no such escalation necessary for things to turn out badly.

Landmines, all of them.

Aizen is a careful cultivator without any dirt under his nails from digging his plots.

Problem two: the figure that enters and stands beneath the moon’s soft spotlight in the centre of the hall is just as sleek and deadly, and it is also Nelliel’s.

The blood in Szayel’s head is now pounding so loudly it somehow overshadows the ringing in his ears and the way his vision turns murky and staticky. He blinks it away, but there is a rolling discomfort through his entire body that makes squirming to try and alleviate it nearly impossible to resist.

She sees him.

If looks could kill… Nelliel would have maimed him a long time ago.

Despite what she might think, staring at Szayel from beneath the soft, choppy pieces of hair framing her face in that delicately ferocious way… he didn’t come to the only seat of civilization in this hell-scape specifically to find her. Though he’d never admit he still looks over his shoulder and half expects her to be there, he hasn’t thought about her in a record time of seven hours, given the nature of the last seven hours that have tortured him instead.

The meeting takes some time to introduce Nelliel and for Aizen to give vague assurances of security within Las Noches. They are all safe to be assembled in such close quarters. Szayel doesn’t argue, and his silence is taken for endorsement, and he realizes he doesn’t care at all if he’s the next one to start tearing apart at the seams.

When his vision focuses again, it’s only him and Nelliel left. She sits beside him. Still, Szayel feels her aura more than sees her, close enough to touch but distanced so far by how she looks nowhere but straight ahead, her peripheral vision to him blocked by a thick twist of her sea-foam curls.

“Does it cause you immense pain to summon that crocodile teared look?” Nelliel says harshly. “I’m entirely sure of what you expect to happen here.”

What is he going to say? How should he approach this? Should he grovel at her feet for forgiveness as he’s practiced in his imagination some hundreds of times before? Should he passionately embrace her and atone for his past completely irrelevant mistakes through carnality alone? Offer his throat for the slashing?

“Why don’t you tell me anyways?” Szayel careens into her space so she’ll have to look at him, fluttering his eyelashes. This seems to distract her from his hand sliding onto hers between them on the sofa.

She sneers. Oh, good. He’s going to piss her off. That’s fine. He usually does that.

If he can’t make her leap back into his arms, he may as well make her all the more disgusted in him. Perhaps she’d leave Las Noches and let his soul remain unscathed and festering as it was in its own shadowy machinations.

Their fingers fit together so well that it strikes him, not for the first time, what a shame this separation was. Is.

“You love the sound of your own voice above all else,” Nelliel says.

“Mm. But your tone when you’re berating me… _does something_ for me.”

“This is your problem.”

“Oh?”

“You don’t communicate.”

“Ah.”

“You use words, things that have meaning, to mean nothing at all.”

“Mhm.”

“You have no grasp on the effect it has on other people.”

“Keep going, by all means.”

“You selfish, self-absorbed prick.”

“Now…”

“But you hate yourself more than you hate everyone else. That’s why you destroy other people. To delude yourself that they’re all as bad as you.”

Szayel scoffs. “How much do I pay you for this session?”

Nelliel snatches her hand back from under his and storms out of the room. As she was whipping towards he door, Szayel could see the hurricane in her grey eyes and it makes him want to fall to his knees before a Madonna mural and confess that he misses her, he thinks of her every waking hour, and yes he otherwise thinks of nothing but himself — himself being with her.

He thinks of how worthy he is to be hated by her. This is the only thought he can’t get rid of by choking it down with his own hands, even if it is a _bad thought_.

Szayel hasn’t felt both exhilarated and on the verge of a chasm in a long time, but he knows the pattern of behaviour well. He has the compulsion for risk. He has a taste for danger. An almost manic twinge in the back of his skull to do things that he would otherwise plan extensively — knowing he could make things easier for himself but playing with fire each time instead is lively and thrilling.

Menial people test the boundaries of consequence through things like procrastination.

Szayel goes hunting for trouble and enlightenment, at whatever cost. The currency here is blood and prestige, which only affords you losing less blood than otherwise.

He’s going to look for the camera room.

He takes to the halls and drifts his fingers delicately across the walls to sense any minute cracks, pulsing his reiatsu ever so slightly to sense where there may be an empty space signifying a hidden room. After some time in the maze, he catches a faint draft.

Where… ah. There. Szayel traces the seam in the wall with a gloved finger, and with enough pressure the panel sinks into the ground. He quickly steps into the dimly lit room and wastes no time in testing a key on a long panel of keyboards and controls. If his body wasn’t practically vibrating with adrenaline, his risk-hunger would be entirely inappropriate. Who knows what kind manner of security there is added to his design. But his blueprints are a faded memory.

One screen changes, so he presses the same key again, shifting the camera angle. He leans over the console and begins slamming through camera views, looking for the foreboding dark purple room his camera bug had just momentarily caught weeks ago.

“Marvellous,” he whispers under his breath as he scrolls through various corners and cracks of Las Noches.

Just when Szayel is about to fumble into the nearest chair attached to the console to get more comfortable, there’s voices outside, louder and louder until they pause by the sealed door.

Oh, shit. Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit.

Szayel glances frantically around the room until he has no choice but to try the only possible hiding place — behind a tall, whirring column of data servers. He slides into the small space, one shoulder squished against the wall and the other up against a flickering module.

Breathe. Or don’t? Does he breathe or not? What can the beasts that roam these halls detect, and which of them will walk in? He thinks of some horned, half-skull disaster of a face to poke around the corner any second, and, well, it’d be quite pathetic if he pissed himself and ruined all this equipment. He just might, though.

The door is opening.

Szayel doesn’t know how long he’ll have to hide here — he gives one last minute shift to get a modicum of comfort out of this scenario, but something holds him back. He looks down.

He’s snagged some wires. The clunky connectors are looped around his ankle and stuck in the tread of his boot.

Fuck.

“Let’s make it quick, Gin,” Aizen says. “I have a busy schedule today.”

Fuck!

The two chairs in front of the screens squeak as they swing out and the two Shinigami seat themselves.

“Huh,” Gin mutters as he pecks at the keyboard. “Some of the camera feeds aren’t showing up.”

“But they are in working order?”

“Mhm.”

“I’ll take a look.”

Footsteps.

Aizen drops to one knee in front of the data column. Szayel’s breath hiccups, and his feet scuffle backwards despite himself. It does nothing more than snag the cable further. Aizen smiles up at Szayel, and grasps his ankle with the utmost gentleness, untangling the cord and plugging it back in.

“Ah,” Gin drawls from the console. “You got it, Aizen.”

“Yes,” Aizen replies. His hand smooths up Szayel’s calf as he stands. “It wasn’t properly connected. An easy dilemma, with how messy this room is.”

“I’ll clean it, I’ll clean it.”

“You’ve put off everything I’ve told you to do for the last century,” Aizen muses softly as he returns to his seat. “Bad dog.”

Gin cackles. “Ya thought about what to do with the hōgyoku yet?”

“It is quite troublesome, isn’t it?”

“Worked the last time, though.”

“But its power was utilized to a far lesser degree. Half-breeds… no, quarter-breeds are more easily managed than the magnitude of what we aspire to achieve.”

Szayel’s head swims with panic and confusion. He’s trying to focus on words he’s never heard before, attempting to decipher what Aizen and Gin could possibly be discussing, and at the same time trying to control the hot beads of sweat trailing down the back of his neck. His hair is sticking to his forehead and collecting moisture beneath his glasses but he dares not raise a hand to abate his torment.

“I don’t see anything,” Gin says.

“Good.” Aizen sounds to be getting up. “Our containment strategy is working for the time being. I have work to attend to in Seireitei.”

When the door slides shut behind them, Szayel withers against the wall and holds back his sweat-soaked hair from his face, panting through the adrenaline come-down. He waits until his unfocused tunnel vision dissipates before he stands, unmoving, under a decontamination shower back at the laboratory for thirty minutes.

There, dripping and cold, his desire is crystallized: he needs to take back control. He needs his own power. He must have his own arrancar who are loyal to him alone.

* * *

Szayel, against his better judgement, recruited Ulquiorra as his body guard and sniffer dog in pursuit of a notable reiatsu blip. He's kept his nose buried in his scanner the majority of the hike outside of Las Noches' rural bounds, because every time he looks up expecting to see a marvel of evolution, all he sees is Aizen advancing on him with a poisonous smile and hands outstretched to wring the life out of him.

Ulquiorra's horn looks awfully sharp. He wants to request a lobotomy. Promptly. The only thoughts swimming around in his head for the past few days have been attempts to decipher what Aizen had meant… half-breeds, quarter-breeds, of what? Of what? Of _what?_

“This way,” Szayel veers off to the left, trudging up a rocky face. The thinner the layer of sand, the slipperier it becomes. At the top, he replaces his scanner for a pair of binoculars to hone in on his find. A fine specimen. Szayel stows his binoculars in his shoulder bag and descends into the dune’s valley with a controlled slide.

The adjuchas smells him and whips around, its nostrils flaring and squelchy, translucent skin fluttering. Its bull-shaped mask is cracked down the middle and chipping away, but reiatsu is pouring out of the wound. In due time it will likely empty itself and add to the sand. Szayel approaches slowly, pitying the state of it.

How many of them had to die to create this vast realm? How many epochs of hollow populate the landscape?

“Oh, God,” the adjuchas mutters in a tinny timbre. “Oh, God, oh God,”

Szayel stops abruptly.

“God?” It whines.

It’s not cursing him. It’s revering him.

That should feel good. That type of exaltation should make him feel very good. But he feels rather unsettled instead, like something huge is looming behind him.

In the next moment, Ulquiorra is standing beneath the beast’s massive torso, his hand wrist-deep in its ribcage and pulling along its length like a zipper. Or, more accurately, an autopsy. The adjuchas shrieks for reprieve, but it has already started dematerializing. Its whipping tail fades first into the dark sky. Soon, it is nothing but a shimmer of smoke across the horizon.

“What did you do that for?” Szayel snaps.

Ulquiorra regards him like he’s grown a second head. Maybe that’s how he always looks. “It wasalready dying.”

“I could have…” Szayel trails off. He couldn’t have done anything, really. There’s no way to save something dead from continuing to die. “I’ll find another. But I lead on these expeditions. You don’t so much as look at the thing before I tell you to, lest that alone have the power to blow it up.”

Ulquiorra’s limp stance speaks for itself: just try and stop him.

“What do you think the adjuchas meant, by God?” Szayel asks.

“Breaking the mask splits the beast from itself. You cannot hear yourself when you are chained in a zanpakutō. When our minds are empty, we try to find replacements, else we die.”

_That's impossible,_ Szayel thinks, but he's not sure if he wants to say it out loud. If he should say it out loud. "Philosophically," his voice is thick like syrup in the back of his throat, "all of us are dead. Literally, too, perhaps. I haven't reached any concrete conclusions on the nature of this purgatory."

“Perdition,” Ulquiorra says. “We are rotten mulch on the inside."

Szayel swallows sand daggers, wishing he could change the topic quickly. This one has settled too heavily on his shoulders. “Why are you so keen on helping me with this project, then? If it’s all so self-evident to you?”

“I was told to."

“Do you always do what you’re told to?” Szayel challenges.

“When it means making sure you do as well.”

“And that matters to you…?”

“I am indebted to Aizen. Do you think you are not?”

“Well,” Szayel slides closer to Ulquiorra. “I’m more interested in what _you_ think I should do.”

Ulquiorra stares at him for a long few seconds. “Have you ever felt compelled to do something?”

“What a confusing question,” Szayel laughs, slightly taken aback.

Ulquiorra elaborates, “A voice that is not your own telling you to do something or go somewhere.”

“I… suppose. You’re only describing instinct. Subconsciousness, maybe.”

“Where did the instinct come from? And when did the consciousness become subdued?”

“Don’t tell me you’re about to answer questions that have eluded science for millennia.”

Szayel suppresses the natural instinct of a prey animal to jump out of his skin when Ulquiorra’s eyes bore deeper into his soul. “Why do you talk to me if not to find answers?” Ulquiorra asks.

“It would be an obvious lie to say you’re good company,” Szayel grins slyly.

“Yes,” Ulquiorra mutters. The quarter slotted into Ulquiorra’s windup toy ass (if it’s even possible, given the enormous stick he fetches for Aizen already up there) has run out and he’s functionally nonverbal again. He tilts his head back to the direction of Las Noches.

Szayel returns to the laboratory empty-handed, but with a busy mind.

Half-breeds and quarter-breeds… The thought bubbles to the surface as he idly sits in front of a caged, pacing hollow, absentmindedly tapping his pen rhythmically on a thick stack of blank papers. Half-breeds and quarter-breeds… Half-breeds, half-breeds, half-breeds.

If he can’t capture a worthy adjuchas, why doesn’t he make his own as well?

The caged hollow is weak and not much larger than a small pony, but it has a latent hunger in its eyes that Szayel can no longer be ignorant of. He has a large collection of even more feeble life in the laboratory. Rat, cat, dog-sized runts that he bores of cracking open like crab legs as he’d done with dozens before them. He takes each one by the tail or snout and drops them into the top of the cage, watching with mirthful glee as his hollow gobbles up its easily subdued meals. It grows quickly and painfully, judging by how its body moulds and melds into new forms. But Szayel matches each of its cries with his laughter, full of evolutionary mirth.

Szayel depletes his entire stock in a frenzied few hours. The hollow can eat ceaselessly, if anything only desiring more and more after each easy kill.

“I know, I know,” He speaks to his hollow sympathetically as he stomps the last meal down through the hatch. Good thing, or else it would soon outgrow the cage. He saved the best for last, a grotesque gremlin the size of a pony. “You want to be free out in the desert, hunting for yourself. Following your natural instincts. But,” Szayel squats in front of his hollow as it pulls limb from socket with its huge, flat teeth. Its eyes and mouth are horrifyingly human-adjacent. “You listen to me now. I feed you, I will clothe you, I will take care of you, and in return you will serve me. I _made you.”_

In some perverse way, it looks like it understands.

Next: Szayel tranquilizes Subject and restrains it on an operating table. He names his hollow Subject because, well, it’s the easiest to record in his notes. In the cold room, he selects the freshest human pituitary gland he has. He dons his sterile clothing, lays his tools out, and… begins.

Szayel bores into Subject’s skull and carefully incises its gelatinous, pinkish brain. While he has his quick fingers in there, he severs the two hemispheres with an efficient slice. If the two sides are speaking to one another, it’s another voice he must replace.

_Rotten mulch on the inside_ , Ulquiorra's haunting voice echoes.

Szayel's stomach twinges. The watery membrane squelches around his knuckles. He connects the new pituitary gland in and staples Subject closed.

It will take some time for Subject to wake. Szayel loosens its restraints and switches off the bright operating room lights overhead. While waiting for any signs of life from Subject, he wheels a lamp over to the nearby sink and cleans his tools, but Subject is still unresponsive by the time he’s finished this. Szayel bids his experiment well and returns after several hours of neurotic pacing around the laboratory.

In the dark, his creation twitches, groans, and Szayel’s breath is like a burning coal stuck in the back of his throat.

Unable to take his eyes off it, Szayel grapples blindly to his sides to find the lamp, and it sways back and forth over the operating table. On the first rapid pass, his creation is moving, but he can see only its back. A well-formed spinal column. That’s a good sign. On the second pass, it’s lifting itself onto its elbow and turning to face him. It has long, blonde hair positioned in clumps around its scalp. Peeling skin. The jaw is unhinged, not because it’s been broken or ripped, but because something has burrowed through the skull, furrowed the muscle underneath its path like a bullet.

The light stabilizes.

His monster’s limbs flop uselessly as it pushes itself off the table pathetically, its sallow body slapping humidly on the floor. The table hits the equipment around it with a noise like thunder, so loud that Szayel’s eyes snap shut. Or maybe it’s seeing the monster carve a determined path towards him that he wants to deny, its raw elbows and knees skidding on the smooth floor, the side of its face and lolling tongue pressed to the floor.

It’s whining, like a dog, or an infant with a pillow over its head.

Szayel thinks of when Yylfordt first decided to grow his hair out. For a while, he had this ugly little tail at the back of his head that Szayel always used to pull. One night he cracked open a pilfered sleeping pill over a glass of water left momentarily on the counter and, when Yylfordt was dead asleep, Szayel shaved a stripe up the back of his head. He most likely didn’t need to go to such length to reap the rewards of seeing his brother humiliated. But Yylfort whined, and whined, and whined.

The light is swaying again. Szayel’s hands are shaking. He clamps one palm over his mouth.

Szayel’s monster reaches out, its crooked, underdeveloped fingers catching on the ridges of his boots. He throws up into his cupped hand and sprints out of the laboratory, the crunching of fingers under his heel bringing more bile up. It’s stringy and cloying in his mouth, on his hand, and he spits it out in globs onto the floor. Eyes watering, Szayel slams the rattling door closed on the monster’s wailing.

He vomits again onto the floor when it scratches and mewls at the bottom of the door.

But thank the God of this infernal dimension that his vomit isn’t black. Just milky and thin and hot on his gums.

“I thought y’were gonna bitch at me about not fighting,” Nnoitra spits blood into the sand. Sand?

Szayel blinks back into reality. The dome is pleasantly warm overhead. He’s outside the laboratory, in the midst of a scene of rubble. Surrounding towers have been reduced into abstract pieces of red concrete scattering the city, and Nnoitra is at ground zero, leaning on his scythe to obscure his injured leg.

“No,” Szayel mumbles. He’s not sure how he got here. “I’m looking for…” he thinks for a moment. Nnoitra looks impatient. “I’m looking for Ulquiorra.”

“Not here. Duh.” Nnoitra spits again. “You just missed the prissy queen bitch herself.”

“Who?” Szayel squints.

“Nelliel,” Nnoitra says like it burns his tongue. Speaking of his tongue… there is a new number on it. Ten.

“When did you lose rank?”

“Today.” Nnoitra shifts uncomfortably. “It’s her fault. She showed up n’ now Aizen has to redo.”

Szayel’s heart drops to his feet. “I have to go,” he turns immediately and begins tracking his way back to his laboratory.

Nnoitra shouts after him, “Thought you were lookin’ for Ulquiorra!”

Szayel does find Ulquiorra after all. He’s waiting in the laboratory, leaning against the wall with his ankles crossed. His eyes move from Szayel, frozen in the doorway from the ravine, to the closed operating room door.

“I saw what you did,” Ulquiorra says.

“You…” The words die in Szayel’s mouth. Not that he even knows what to say. “You put me to it.”

“I didn’t make you do anything.”

“It didn’t work anyways,” Szayel sneers spitefully. “Your silly theory on— gods, voices, instincts… you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Ulquiorra stands up straight and glides over to Szayel. “You’re the fool who thought he was powerful enough to be someone’s god.” He reaches out, hand alight with sparks of green-black reiatsu, and slams Szayel’s head back into the metal doorframe.

Szayel wakes up writhing on his back on a smooth stone floor, the moon shining in his eyes, and the patch of bare skin beneath his belly button raw and itching with the numeral twelve.

Oh, _God_ , he's alive.

_Thank you_ , he whispers, and the words are just as good as his signature on a devil's contract in sealing his soul's fate. He belongs to this realm and its insidious workings, and Aizen is the god of it.


End file.
